SO you’re a former Spice Girl, but the spice has gone from your life and you didn’t make a posh marriage to a world-famous soccer star.

Even if you can’t bend it like Beckham, at least you can belt it on Broadway.

That seems to have been the thinking of Melanie Brown, a.k.a. Scary Spice, now making her Broadway debut in “Rent.” And she’s making that debut at the top, as Mimi Marquez, the drug-addicted heroine of this rehash/update of “La Boheme.”

The late Jonathan Larson’s musical, now in its pulsing and punchy ninth year (Puccini should have been so lucky), has been conceived very much as an ensemble piece.

Brown has gotten unusual star billing; her name in the Playbill was taken out of the show’s customary alphabetical cast listing and writ in typeface as large as that of author Larson and director Michael Greif.

Now that’s Scary! It’s also probably good show business – but the truth is, she’s not all that good, and not all that noticeable.

The best female role here is that of performance artist Maureen Johnson (the stand-in for Puccini’s Musetta), given with octane-powered panache by Maggie Benjamin, who’s returned to the show after a long absence.

In comparison, Brown – her stage inexperience every now and then showing like a slip – appears pallid, although her voice proves agreeable enough and her presence and projection are perfectly adequate. But a star? Hardly. Not yet.

The other newcomer, a veteran from the musical’s national tours, is Jeremy Kushnier as a strong-voiced but weakly acted Roger Davis, who has AIDS and composer’s block, and longs to write “one song” before he hangs up his guitar.

The rest of the cast – led by an exuberant Matt Caplan as the nerdy filmmaker Mark Cohen – remains much as it was.

Terrific turns are still being given by Mark Richard Ford as the gay philosopher Tom Collins; a touching Andy Senor as Angel Schunard, Tom’s transvestite lover; and “American Idol” refugee Frenchie Davis, her lovely voice dominating the ensemble.

The show itself, a modern-style “Hair,” still stands up as a sentimentalized, humorless, soap-opera image of Alphabet City in those drugged and dying days of the last century.

Most important, the show as a whole remains in good shape. You might say it’s “Rent” controlled.